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Software freedom isn't about licenses – it's about power (2021)
8 Mar 2021 A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as synonyms to software freedom.
Today, companies exert power over their users by: tracking, selling data, psychological manipulation, intrusive advertising, planned obsolescence, and hostile Digital “Rights” Management (DRM) software. In the mobile space, where deprecating smartphones after a few short years is the norm and lithium batteries are hanging around in landfills indefinitely, we see the paradox of a freely licensed operating system with an abysmal social track record. On the web, disparate issues of DRM, forced auto-update, privacy, sustainability, and psychological dark patterns converge to a single worst case scenario for software freedom.
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